


Alliance

by rillrill



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: District 1, District 2, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 13:19:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1429972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Do all tributes get to do this?" asks Feather. "Once you accept the bid? Is this normal?"</i>
</p><p>  <i>Max and Chrysalis exchange a look, and both draw a measured breath before Max answers. "No," he says. "The circumstances are - out of the ordinary."</i></p><p> </p><p>In a time of unrest, two trainees from District One are allowed to visit District Two's Center, in order to strengthen the interdistrict alliance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alliance

**Author's Note:**

> Because I love Ones and I love Twos and I wanted them to interact outside of the arena and I like playing in this sandbox. That's why.

Feather isn't really sure how she got her name. Her mother claims it came to her in a dream, which seems par for the course where her mother is concerned. Mom is concerned with other dimensions and seeing beyond their reality, seeing dreams as the part of the iceberg that lies beneath the waterline of consciousness. In the Academy, however, "Feather" is a pejorative. It means light, wispy, made of dandelion fluff. No one would mistake Feather for the insult that bears her name - she isn't tall, but her body is compact and immovable. It's a stupid name and she knows it, but if it throws her opponents off-balance for even a second, she'll work with it.

It's her and Bastion, that's what they've been hearing for months. The mentors can usually predict the top three or four in each year, but in the final months heading up to graduation, the top two always pull ahead, gaining steam in the last leg of the race. Hope isn't lost for the others. It's not unusual for One to send alternates. There are more suspicious last-minute accidents here in One than in any other career district, which some at the Academy argue should beget protective measures for the kids once they accept the tribute bid - "but if they're willing to kill just to get into the arena, aren't those the ones we want to send anyway?" ask others, and in One, this logic prevails.

It's been Feather and Bastion for the past six months, and they make it official when they accept the bids in January, and there are only eight months left until the Day of Volunteering when the murmurs in the outer districts start to send vibrations all the way up to the Capitol seat. From what she can gather from the whispers inside the trainers' lounges, Beetee Latierre has been stirring up trouble on his victory tour, and this year's Games are going to target the outliers, especially Three and Five, the districts who think they're invulnerable because they're smarter than the others. 

There are only six months left when Max and Chrysalis pull Feather and Bastion into the counseling room and inform them that they are going to District Two.

"For how long?" Bastion asks, his voice shifty. His spine is stiff and he sits, alert, straight up in his chair. Tension is always evident in his body when he isn't sparring or climbing the rock wall. Outside the gym, Feather has never seen him look relaxed.

Chrysalis smooths a piece of hair behind her ear. "Several days. Less than a week. This is a special opportunity for you."

"Do all tributes get to do this?" asks Feather. "Once you accept the bid? Is this normal?"

Max and Chrysalis exchange a look, and both draw a measured breath before Max answers. "No," he says. "The circumstances are - out of the ordinary."

They don't ask any more questions after that. Chrysalis gives them what seems like the bare minimum: the Deputy Mayor will be visiting Two as well, there will be camera crews, they are to represent District One to the rest of the nation as is their duty, et cetera. They are to leave the following morning. Feather returns to her dorm early that night, but she doesn't sleep well at all.

 

*

 

Feather has never been on an interdistrict train before, but she's taken the trains between the Academy on the outskirts of the district and her old home in the middle, and it's a letdown to find that these trains aren't very different from the One trains at all. She walks through the car, slightly crestfallen, then picks a seat near a window to watch the windowless, industrial walls zip by.

"This is cool," Bastion says from across the car. "Nobody else has gotten to do this before, you know. We're the first ones."

Feather rolls her eyes and keeps her head tilted in the direction of the window. "You don't know that we're the first ones. All they said was that they don't do this for everyone."

"Well, it's still really cool," says Bastion. "I've never been to Two before, have you?"

"Nope." She smooths her skirt out across her lap. The Image people dressed them both in their nice reaping-day clothes for the trip, and packed extras instead of the plain grey uniforms they wear in class. The dress she's wearing is made of layers of black silk organza, she thinks (it's been a while since the school classes where they memorized the luxury fabrics produced in One), each layer covered in gunmetal sequins. They put Bastion in a matching silver suit that fits him perfectly, and styled his hair in a cut that was popular in the Capitol three years before. "I don't know anyone who has."

"I do," Bastion says. "My grandpa was a Peacekeeper. He was born in Two."

"That's nice," says Feather absently, and turns back to the window.

It's a short ride between the two districts, and when the grey concrete of One gives way to the jagged cliffs and sharp mountain peaks of Two, the train zips into an underground tunnel and their escorts burst into the car to shoo them onto the platform.

She looks over their party as they await their cars. Burns and Silver are a couple of nonentities, tall and well-built and pretty as the day they won their Games, but Feather has never thought much of the One victors. She much prefers the mentors from Two, and during the Games she pays close attention when they're interviewed on Caeser, taking notes and studying their faces like works of art. She likes Bane the most - he's still handsome, with a presence that commands the screen simply by appearance alone - and Diana, who is funny on purpose and has straight chestnut hair the color that Feather's used to be. She likes the most recent victors as well, Jonas and Lyme; he's devilishly good-looking and she's muscular and serious and no one will ever touch her without asking first. 

Next to Two, she has to admit, One's mentors seem different. There's something _off_ about Silver's empty, ringing laugh and Lustre's artificially blue eyes, and no one wants to talk about why Jade is the only woman mentor and how she got those scars. 

Burns and Silver and Max and Chrysalis and Lustre and two Peacekeepers all herd them into a car with Two flags on the hood. The Deputy Mayor is in the car in front of them. There are people on the sidewalks here, some even laughing and enjoying their lunch breaks, and the air is cleaner than she's ever seen. 

 

*

 

The District Two Youth Center for Personal Growth and Development is a fucking mouthful, and "The District Two Youth Center for Personal Grown and Development Welcomes Its Esteemed Visitors from District One" barely fits on the banner hanging in the processing room, but after they pass through two metal detectors and one of the Capitol cameramen answers a few questions about his paperwork, their party enters a cafeteria area to thunderous applause from a roomful of Two kids, from graduates all the way down to the little kids, sevens and eights who are probably still learning drills and playing games in basic training.

Feather plasters on a smile and bats her lashes as she clasps the hand of a Two trainer who has a square jaw and crinkly eyes. She watches as Chrysalis and another female trainer shake hands and as Chrysalis winces from the other woman's grip. She notices that all the kids have on bracelets, almost identical in concept but with variation in the colors of beads and threads, and recalls what they learned in image class about Two's tokens, that they reflect the tribute's performance in year-end tests - the more beads, the deadlier the tribute. 

There's a pair at the front of the Residential table, a boy and a girl with perfect posture and piercing stares, and Feather feels her own spine stiffen much like Bastion's as she meets their eyes. She sneaks a glance at their wrists. She can see the gold beads glinting in the fluorescent lights even from across the room. 

And then she tears her eyes away and sees, from across the room, a group of familiar faces - Bane and Diana and Jonas and Lyme and the rest of the mentors, each as formidable as they've always looked onscreen, and she can't look away, transfixed. She drinks them in. She's a traitor to her own district in that moment, and yet she feels as though this is where she's always belonged.

 

*

 

"Well, that was an impressive performance," Max says out loud to no one. Off Chrysalis' look, he adds, "and Snow willing, we'll all live to see another one."

Chrysalis laughs, and Max shakes his head. He's known what this trip was about from the beginning. Get a camera crew in there, show One and Two putting on a unified front and rallying together for a successful Games year, and hopefully scare the outliers back into line. Some nice speeches from Two's Mayor, and their own Deputy Mayor, and a couple victors from One and Two alike, all meant to send one pointed message: _Together, we are stronger than the rest of you combined. Challenge us, and we will destroy you._

(He's heard that Four is working on putting together a Career program of their own, but he'll believe it when he sees it; it's taken decades for One and Two to get this good.)

"It's all symbolic," he mutters, unaware that he's speaking out loud. "All of them. Us. We're all props."

 

*

 

The next morning, there's a breakfast for the visitors, and they alternate the seating at the table of honor, One-Two-One-Two. Feather is placed between the Two graduates, this year's tributes, with Bastion on the opposite side of the Two girl.

Their names, she learns, are Byron and Mara, and they're stiff, but not unfriendly; Mara offers her the blackcurrant jam ("It's a special recipe from Two, you have to try it,") and Byron fills her in on the other, less-important faces in the room. ("That's Jamison, he's the Alternative Track Director, if you wash out the program you have to go through counseling with him to choose whether you go military or industrial or work for the Center.")

She glances at his wrist as he reaches for the pepper. "I like your bracelet," she says. "Is that going to be your token?"

He looks at her, his brow furrowed as he tries to gauge her interest. "Yeah," he says slowly. "Why? What's yours?"

Feather shrugs. "They don't tell us until we leave," she says. "It's usually a piece of jewelry or something, to represent One, the District of Industry." (One coached line down, only twenty more to shoehorn in.) "How does that represent Two?"

Byron seems to mull the question over, breaking the crust off his toast while he chews on the inside of his cheek. "It's about order," he says finally. "The levels of the program, they're the foundation of our district. Every bracelet that goes into the Games is a reminder of what we're capable of when we work together and have courage and sacrifice." 

Feather nods, and leans over Byron's shoulder. "Excuse me," she says out loud as she passes the blackcurrant jam back to Mara, and then whispers into his ear, "great delivery."

Byron bites back a hard laugh and shoves the rest of his toast into his mouth as the light glitters off his gold bead.

 

*

"You don't have post-victory training?" she says to Mara in the girls' bathroom, rearranging bits of her own hair in the mirror as Mara picks at her fingernails. "That is so weird. What do they want you to do when you're done?"

Mara shrugs. "You know, _mentor_. Live in the Village, really work with the tributes. Go out and shake hands a few times a year."

"That is _so weird_." Feather marvels at the concept - the idea of simply winning the games, then walking away without a second career following your Victory Tour. "Do you even have to mentor if you don't want to?"

"I mean, it's encouraged, but if you're too fucked-up, I don't think they make you," Mara says. "There are a couple who don't, but you don't see them very often. I think the others take care of them pretty good, though."

"That's crazy," says Feather. Mara shrugs again. 

"If you say so," she says, and slips out the door, shoulder-first.

 

*

 

On the third day, they visit the Wall of Sacrifice and the statue of the former President and take a trip out to the mines with the Two Victors to shake some hands. Feather stands at attention the entire time, smiling and giggling at everyone who makes eye contact with her, almost on command. She notices that Diana and Rhea and Lyme never have to giggle and flirt with the men, and when Mara's face relaxes, it falls into a sharp scowl, not a pretty smile. It all seems so alien to her. 

 

*

 

On the fourth day, they're supposed to appear at a District assembly at the Justice Building. But there is no fourth day.

Bastion and Feather are yanked out of bed in the middle of the night, pulled scrabbling down the hall, and pushed into black cars alongside the rest of their traveling party.

The train leaves silently in the velvet early-morning hours and pulls into One by the time the sun has begun to rise.

Max doesn't answer the kids' questions. He grabs Chrysalis' hand in the dark of the quiet train and squeezes, not for romance but for comfort, for reassurance.

 

*

 

When Bastion and Feather and Byron and Mara meet again, eight months later, there's no glimmer of familiarity between the four of them. Caesar and their pre-show interview packages make no mention of the fellowship visit that coincided with the Two Justice Building bombing eight months before, the one that everyone is attributing to Three rebels due to the design of the missile and the strategy - destroying an empty building in the middle of the night for symbolic effect, not mass casualties. 

Byron's jaw is tight and Mara has tears in her eyes when they speak of the rebuilding process, and how Two has risen from the rubble and emerged stronger than before. Feather's interview anecdotes about her flexibility training and her made-up little sister back in One pale in comparison.

Silver pats her on the shoulder before she steps onto the glass-enclosed platform that will raise her into the Arena. "Remember where you come from," he says simply, and Feather takes a deep breath, centering herself before the world goes black.


End file.
